Chocolate Mousse and Peppermint Chocolate drops

The Swedish julbord or Christmas Table is not complete without its array of sweet desserts. In this blog are two of what we had made at home, the first is a Chocolate Mousse cup, filled with a rum soaked brownie in the middle, topped with sliced strawberries and white chocolate shavings.

Chocolate mousse takes very little time to make, though you do need to put aside some time for it to set. What I like about this particular dessert is that you can put this together hours before guests arrive, even the day before, so on the evening of the party, all that is left to do is glide over to the refrigerator and bring out these gorgeous things for serving.

A candy classic found in many Christmas markets in Gothenburg would be Peppermint Chocolate Drops. You’ll recognize it by a white, sometimes near translucent peppermint base with a drop of dark chocolate on top. Chocolate coupled with peppermints, like After Eight mints, are always popular with guests.

We made ours by whipping together 300 g of icing sugar with about 3-4 egg whites and a squeeze of lemon juice. After the whipping is done, we dropped in about 3-5 drops of Japanese peppermint oil because it contains 85% menthol. If you don’t wish for the peppermint flavour to be too pungent, you could try using English peppermint oil with 60%-70% menthol or American peppermint oil, with about 50%-60% menthol. You could rather also use less peppermint oil in the mix altogether.

The chocolate drops came from unsweetened cooking chocolate with about 70% cacao. We used them as is, with no sugar added, to counter balance the sweetness of the icing peppermint base.